I SHALL NOT WANT

“I Shall Not Want”
From the love of my own comfort
From the fear of having nothing
From a life of worldly passions
Deliver me O God

From the need to be understood
From the need to be accepted
From the fear of being lonely
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

From the fear of serving others
From the fear of death or trial
From the fear of humility
Deliver me O God
Deliver me O God

May we find the courage to kneel before the cross offering our murk, our darkness, our brokenness this Lenten season. And may we be so bold as to open our hearts and minds to the ways God is desiring to work in and through us to bring the bright light of Christ to our dark and messy world.

“So watch your step. Use your head. Make the most of every chance you get. These are desperate times!”

SECULAR HUMANISM TODAY

                                      SECULAR  HUMANISM TODAY

The modern world is often said to have turned its back on religious belief. But secular morality is rooted in Christianity and the two creeds should work together to resist the rise of populism

One of the things I have always found fascinating and maddening about Christianity is its political slipperiness. Is it basically progressive or is it basically reactionary? It is more progressive, more radical than any secular form of politics. As an undergraduate I was excited by the prophetic vision of universal peace and justice; it felt like a more benign version of the Marxism that one or two of my peers espoused, and more substantial than the vague socialism that almost all the rest of them subscribed to.

But how could one counter the argument that Christianity is essentially backward-looking? Its strongest forms are often defiantly opposed to certain liberal causes, and the Anglicanism that I vaguely affirmed was steeped in nostalgic traditionalism. Should one try to reform Christianity, which would make it more attractive to one’s liberal friends – or would that mean watering it down, reducing it to little more than a desire for political progress with a tinge of religiosity?

As a postgraduate student of theology, I found that liberal reformism was very much out of fashion. The sharpest thinkers strongly rejected liberal Protestantism, arguing that it merged the Gospel with Enlightenment rationalism. I largely agreed, but quietly harboured a rather liberal concern: shouldn’t we also affirm Christianity’s affinity with liberal values with the humanism of our day? Instead of scorning it as a rival creed, shouldn’t we argue that, in fact, the humanist vision largely derives from Christianity? It seemed that there was a delicate knot to unpick here, and that the usual answers were too blunt.

After 9/11, the polarisation between religion and secular liberal values seemed to sharpen. Atheist secularists were driving this polarisation, but church leaders were often adding to it. But Christianity is actually deeply involved in the ideal of universal human rights, and in the idea of “secularism”, in the sense of the separation of Church and state. This can be expressed without the old wet liberalism intruding – but only if we tell a bold new story of how Christianity relates to modernity and its dominant creed, “secular humanism”. 

This public ideology gets lost amid the complexity and partisan bickering. It arose on Christian, mainly Protestant, soil. Even if secular humanism rejects religion in the name of “rationalism”, its moral assumptions derive from the Christian centuries. The key to this dynamic is the little word “deism”. For most of the architects of the Enlightenment were deists – believers in a rational God. They rejected, or sidelined, revealed religion but inherited Christian moral assumptions and often adapted Protestant zeal against superstition and empty ritual. It was these thinkers, whose heyday was about 1680-1790, and who include Spinoza, Locke, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson and Kant, who established the creed of the modern West. And subsequent thinkers, such as Marx and John Stuart Mill, were no less indebted to Christian moral tradition. So the humanist principles of liberty and equality are rooted in Christianity. 

It does not come naturally to us to believe that we can move towards a world of ever-greater justice for all, that all lives are of equal worth, that oppression and discrimination must end. It comes far more naturally to see drastic inequality as inevitable, and distant others as inferior to us.

And secular humanism has continued to be shaped by its Christian basis. In the mid-twentieth century the ideal of universal human rights was launched by mostly Christian thinkers and statesmen. And Christianity was central to the civil rights movement in America. 

To point out the Christian basis of modern moral assumptions is hardly a new argument – Nietzsche was perhaps the first to make it, from his hostile perspective. It is widely accepted by academics in various disciplines and, over the past decade a few authors have, often tentatively, raised the issue. It was a major part of Terry Eagleton’s response to the new atheists, for example, and Nick Spencer, of the think tank Theos, has made the case, drawing on the American historian of ideas, Larry Siedentop. Paradoxically, even the “secular” aspect of secular humanism has Christian origins, for it was Protestants who pioneered the separation of Church and state. 

Our affirmation of secular humanism must be balanced by criticism of it. It is limited. It does not offer people meaning, or have the same power to inspire or sustain them, or to help them form strong social bonds. There is a “thinness” to secular humanism.

But it would be a mistake to reject it in favour of the true thickness of religious culture. Instead, I suggest, secular humanism must necessarily be expressed in thin terms, so that it can unite almost everyone in a diverse society. That does not make it a dangerous thing, as neoconservative thinkers say. But it does make it an incomplete thing: it has no coherent account of why we should seek the good of all, for example, or of why moral universalism is a sacred ideal. 

It feebly claims – with little evidence – that this ideal comes naturally to all rational people; the reality is that secular humanism derives its moral vision from Christianity. This explains its goodness, and its inadequacy: for in secularising the Christian vision it thins it out. Rejecting secular humanism feels straightforward and brave, if one is a Christian – but this is a temptation. The task is to affirm it, and point to its Christian roots.

Secular humanism remains the West’s core creed, in spite of the current rise of illiberal populism in the US and Europe. But it lacks self-awareness and self-confidence. A half-baked populist movement, with a ­muddled message, has the power to discombobulate it utterly. There is little sense that secular humanism knows how to define itself, or defend itself. Strange though it may sound, I think that Christians have a special role in helping secular humanism through its present wobble. It is a tradition with deeper roots than it knows.

UNDERSTANDING POPE FRANCIS 

 by Cardinal Vincent Nichols 

Two words are at the heart of the Pope’s drive to reform the Church: accompaniment and discernment. And they are key to understanding the document at the centre of increasingly heated debate, Amoris Laetitia

Pope Francis has made it clear what he wants to achieve in and for the Church. In his apostolic letter, Misericordia et Misera, issued at the end of the Year of Mercy last November, he speaks of “a perennial activity of pastoral conversion and witness to mercy”. He speaks of generating a “culture of mercy” in the Church. This, it seems to me, is Francis’ real programme.

As I was reading this letter for the first time, I was also listening to a young man who was talking with a group of bishops as we were engaged in preparations for next year’s Synod of Bishops, which will be on “Youth, Faith and Vocational Discernment”. When he was asked what young people feared most today, he replied with one word, “failure”. Reflecting on the Church’s teaching, especially on sexuality, he said: “It has no room for failure. It is impossible for us to work with.”

This phrase, “the culture of mercy”, and the words of this young man hold the key to understanding the entire reform that Pope Francis is trying to bring about. It is important to understand this, as it is related directly to Amoris Laetitia (“The Joy of Love”), the apostolic exhortation from the Synod of Bishops on the Family.

Two words are at the heart of Pope Francis’ drive to see the Church become a place of mercy and salvation: accompaniment and discernment. These words were central to the Year of Mercy and they will be central to the next Synod of Bishops. And they are central to understanding Amoris Laetitia.

This passionate drive of Pope Francis arises from the conviction that the whole point of the Church founded by Christ is to bring us to the Father, to God, through the transformation of grace. This, he insists, is God’s entire project, working through creation and redemption, and through every moment in the life of every human being. In a wonderful phrase, Pope Francis describes the world as “God’s construction site”.

Francis is calling for a radical reform of the Church, of you and me, asking us to go back to these very basic truths and learn again how to live by them and be shaped by them. I say “go back”, because I see in these truths the very best of much traditional teaching, pastoral wisdom and practice.

For Francis, reform or renewal is not an idea, or a theory, imposing itself on history or on the Church. Reform is an accompaniment of each other – bishops with the Pope in the Synod, priests in a council, pastoral reflection in a deanery or in a parish, the confessor in the confessional box – as we try to discern the working of God in each concrete circumstance. To be part of this process, we may have to allow some models we had formed in our heads to be broken down.

Two axioms lie at the heart of the Pope’s vision. The first is this: time is greater than space (explored in his encyclical letter, Evangelii Gaudium, 222-225). We should not be trying to fill, or dominate, space and shape it as we believe it ought to be shaped. Rather, we must respect the speed, the timing – slow or fast – of processes of growth and change.

This runs contrary to much that we are accustomed to in our hurried, busy culture. Yes, as we face a new problem or challenge, we bring our ideas to it. But we must always give time to respect and grow close to the reality, to attend carefully to its complexity and allow its own dynamic to become clear. This means exercising some self-restraint in expressing our opinions – and certainly never shouting them. It means not rushing to separate the wheat from the tares. It means thinking twice – at least – before we tweet.

There is an interesting application, or reflection, on this first axiom. It has been pointed out to me that, for many, the first step on the road to a return to the full practice of the faith is one of being embraced by the Church, of experiencing a sense of belonging. Often we might be tempted to think that true belonging only comes after the necessary changes or reform of life. On the contrary, if a concrete sense of belonging is created and experienced, then the pathway of conversion can open up, with all the time that it might need. Pope Francis is a genius at creating this sense of belonging for those who feel they are excluded.

A second axiom that lies at the heart of the Pope’s vision is this: reality is more important than ideas (Evangelii Gaudium, 231-233). For Francis, reform is always a matter of spiritual discernment, whether in the life of the Church or of the individual. Such discernment attends first of all to the realities, to the limited degrees of goodness and failure that are to be found there. We accompany one another in our slow progress towards the revealed fullness of life to which we are called. What we are looking for, in this discernment, are the shades of progress, not the black and white of a final judgement.

The reform of the Church, and the pastoral care of individuals, should not be seen as a battle of ideas. A battle of ideas, so beloved of the media, tends to take us away from the very place that should fill our hearts and minds: the respectful, even reverential, regard for the reality of a person’s life and how God is at work in it at any moment. We are often tempted to retreat into ideological clashes between so-called “liberals” and “conservatives”. This ends up taking us away, often for our comfort, from the reality before our eyes. Yet that is precisely where God is to be found and where he wants us to be.

“I know that you face many challenges,” Pope Francis said to the bishops of the United States in September 2015, “and that the field in which you sow is unyielding, and that there is always the temptation to give in to fear, to lick one’s wounds, to think back on bygone times and to devise harsh responses to fierce opposition. And yet we are promoters of the culture of encounter. 

“We are living sacraments of the embrace between God’s riches and our poverty. We are witnesses of the abasement and the condescension of God who anticipates in love our every response. For this, harsh and divisive language does not befit the tongue of a pastor, it has no place in his heart; although it may momentarily seem to win the day, only the enduring allure of goodness and love remains truly convincing.”

In understanding that reality is more important than ideas, we have to take limitations – not least our own – seriously and learn how to work within them. This is the antidote to what the Pope calls, in his blunt way, the “aggression of idealism” or “pastoral autocracy”. This does not mean we have to simply surrender to our limitations, and sink deeper into the sofa. We should be clear where the signposts are, pointing to the path we are to try to follow, discerning the next steps and walking, as best we can, together with others who are making the journey.

A third key perspective of Francis is that before the mystery of God nothing is too big and nothing is too small. We should not turn away from the radical demands of the Gospel – and its unfolding in practice – which always seem unrealistic. But nor should we disdain  the simplest of gestures, which often give expression to the greatest of truths.

The art of accompaniment and discernment is the art of learning to recognise our limits and to embrace our desires. It takes humility to recognise our limitations, to let go of the last vestiges of seeing myself as a hero and to acknowledge that I stand in need, constantly, of forgiveness, especially from those who love me most. And we also have to embrace our deepest desires: that pervading longing to be better, the lingering hope of holiness; the marvellous moments when we catch a glimpse, through the clouds of our everyday lives, of the bright horizon of our hopes and dreams, and everything again seems possible.

This takes us right through to the moment of death, for which life is a trial run. Cardinal Basil Hume expressed this lasting power of faith and hope beautifully. As he was facing death, he said he felt a little like he was sitting in the front row of the stalls, waiting for the curtain to go up.

Francis seems to be inviting us to learn to give deep respect to the reality of life, to recognise the limits of the possibilities open to us at each point. Day by day, we are to seek to deepen our desire for goodness, for conversion, for closeness to the Lord. Gradually we learn how to discern the next step in response to God’s mercy, and how to see the longer and challenging pathway we are to take. This can only be done if we give it time, if we are in tune with the Spirit through prayer.

This is the wisdom of the reform that Pope Francis is laying before us, with persistence and patience. He is remarkable. He is our shepherd and he is to be lovingly followed.

GNOSTIC GOD

                                          The Gnostic God

There is an old saying: “God is forgiving; Nature, not so much.” Nature can, indeed, be very unforgiving.

This is likely why Gnostics, ancient and modern, have always opposed the God of the Old Testament. The God of the Old Testament created Nature and promulgated the Law. He doesn’t let me do what I want without consequences. He’s the God who created human beings male and female and told them to be fruitful and multiply; the God who warned human beings that, although their freedom was wide-ranging, this freedom had to stop short of trying to take control over good and evil. Humans should not seek to “become like God” and try to create “good” and “evil.” Their calling is, rather, to discover the goodness inherent in the world God created and act accordingly; not presuming to try “make” something good “because I say so.”

The problem with “values clarification” is that it suggests things in the world have the value I give them. But if that’s true, then the reverse must also be true. If I don’t “value” something, it has no value. This mistake is just as easily made, depending on the ideology of the individual, about old-growth forests as it is about unborn children. If I choose to “value” it, it can continue to exist. If I don’t, then it’s acceptable to clear-cut the one or terminate the other. People increasingly feel convinced that governments exist precisely to “free” us in this way to set aside the constraints of Nature, so my act of personal will can take its place.

For similar reasons, many people prefer the Gnostic god of “spirituality” to the bothersome Old Testament Creator-God of Nature and the Moral Law. And yet is the rule of this “god” better, especially for the poor, the weak, the widow, and orphan? How well are these cared for by the engines of laissez-faire capitalism or the modern bureaucratic state? How well are they faring under the regime of lifestyle liberalism?

I suggest that we can learn a great deal about contemporary Gnostics by examining their earlier forebears. Ancient Gnostics, thinking the body unimportant and valuing only the “spirit,” often engaged in stringent punishment of their bodies. Their modern counterparts often engage in similarly stringent diets of a specificity and relentless rigor that makes the simple Catholic Lenten fast look like a banquet.

                                    Among ancient Gnostics, those who had attained higher levels of spiritual “knowing” (gnosis) and whose ascetic practices had honed their bodies into perfect temples of “the spirit,” were an “elite” who could look with a sad disdain at the great unwashed, those still tied to bodies and matter and Nature. There were among “the many,” those who also wished to be among, or at least be associated with, these elite “knowing” ones, so they devoted themselves to the study of their oftentimes bizarre, rarely reasonable ruminations and proclamations.

The similarities to certain parts of the Christian message was precisely what made ancient forms of Gnosticism so dangerous, and why the early Church Fathers spent so much of their energy arguing against them, carefully clarifying how orthodox Christianity differed from what these Gnostics were selling.

Of the many fronts in this battle, the first was to insist that Christ was both the Word made flesh and the Word through whom God created the world; that the God of the New Testament could not be separated from the God of the Old; and that the “spiritual” teaching of the Sermon on the Mount could not be separated from the moral law of Mount Sinai. All of these were expressions of one divine will.

Moreover, the way the Church Fathers chose to enter the struggle with the spiritual elite who claimed to be the bearers of a greater “knowing” was with solid arguments – with logic (from the Greek logos). As Pope Benedict XVI often emphasized, it was not without reason (literally) that God revealed Himself in the Gospel as the Logos, as the ultimate ground of reason.

The Fathers did not battle the Gnostics by trying to “one-up” their sentimental appeals; they formulated the best arguments they could muster, and in doing so became the true heirs of the best Greek and Roman philosophers. The patrimony of Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero lived on in Fathers like Basil of Caesarea, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Augustine of Hippo. And having preached the words, the Fathers showed their truth by acting in integrity with them – to the point of being willing to give their lives in witness to it.

What sort of formation do we owe our young people today to counter the many purveyors of modern Gnosticism? May I suggest it should be like the one offered by the Church Fathers. It should be devoted to explicating the goodness of creation, showing how the sacramental character of material things allows them to realize their true nature as instruments of God’s selfless love. So too it should renew our appreciation of the “natural law” as revealed in and through the Decalogue. And it should affirm, in union with the Fathers and Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the importance of human reason and logic.

Can we not now see how defenseless we have left the young, having stripped from Catholic education regular courses in the Philosophy of Nature, the natural law, and logic, in favor of “soft” courses in “Religion and Spirituality”? It has left us a generation “lost in the cosmos,” as novelist Walker Percy called it, having no natural place, not even in our own bodies, no longer capable of discourse or dialectic: disembodied ghosts without a meaningful world or words.

In a virtual world dominated by Facebook fantasies and internet illusions, Christian parents and educators should promise young people nothing less than a true encounter with full-bodied reality. Anything less would be just another media gimmick, unworthy of the Word made flesh.

© 

MAN-WOMAN STATUS

Pope: "Man and woman are not equal, but neither is superior to the other"

In his homily at Casa Santa Marta, Pope Francis recalled the Book of Genesis, and emphasized that woman brings a new element to Creation: harmony. He explained that man and woman are not equal, but neither is superior to the other.

FRANCISCO

"A woman is harmony, is poetry, is beauty. Without her the world would not be so beautiful, it would not be harmonious. And I like to think – but this is a personal thing – that God created women so that we would all have a mother.”

The Pope also denounced that hurting a woman is not just a crime, but it also destroys the harmony of the world.

SUMMARY OF PAPAL HOMILY IN ENGLISH

(Source: Vatican Radio)

"When women are not there, harmony is missing. We might say: But this is a society with a strong masculine attitude, and this is the case, no? The woman is missing. ‘Yes, yes: the woman is there to wash the dishes, to do things…’ No, no, no! The woman is there to bring harmony. Without the woman there is no harmony. They are not equal; one is not superior to the other: no. It’s just that the man does not bring harmony. It’s her. It is she who brings that harmony that teaches us to caress, to love with tenderness; and who makes the world a beautiful place.” And they looked at me, they looked me in the eyes – I’ll never forget those eyes, eh? – then they turned and they told me, both together: ‘We are in love.’ After 60 years, this means ‘one flesh.’ And this is what the woman brings: the capacity to love one another. Harmony for the world. Often we hear: ‘No, it is necessary in this society, in this institution, that here there should be a woman because she does this, she does these things.’ No, no, no, no! Functionality is not the purpose of women. It is true that women should do things, to do things as we all do. The purpose of women is to make harmony, and without women there is no harmony in the world. Exploiting persons is a crime of ‘lèse-humanité’: it’s true. But exploiting a woman is even more serious: it is destroying the harmony that God has chosen to give to the world. It is to destroy.”        

This is the great gift of God: He has given us woman. And in the Gospel, we have heard what a woman is capable of, eh? She is courageous, that one, eh? She went forward with courage. But there is more, so much more. A woman is harmony, is poetry, is beauty. Without her the world would not be so beautiful, it would not be harmonious. And I like to think – but this is a personal thing – that God created women so that we would all have a mother. 

MARY AND OUR INNER SELVES

MARY AND OUR INNER SELVES

She is the Madonna of the Streets, the Madonna of the Refugees, the Madonna of the Ghetto. But she is also

Our Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham, not to mention Guadalupe, Lourdes and Fatima. She is in

short our maternal guide from the trials of Earth to the everlasting happiness of Heaven

LADY of Lourdes is praying,

halfway up the stairs. At the end         

of my daughter’s bookshelf the

Immaculate Conception dispenses

benedictions. When my daughter gets bored

by Mass, she revives with talk of Mary. After

all, I say, Mary is only human; she is easy to

understand. She has become Our Lady of

Homework, Our Lady of Sleeping Alone in

the Dark.

In the past two millennia she has been taken

a long way from the woman of Nazareth. After

the birth, the death, the Resurrection, she

became a kind of triage nurse in the hinterland

between Heaven and Earth, speeding some

closer to God, dispensing mercy, appearing

and disappearing at critical moments in our

history. She first appeared before she was

even dead, to St James in Saragossa. Since

then it has been a centuries-long curtain call

as she does that thing we need so badly: she

finds us where we are at.

WHEREVER SHE appears – Guadalupe,

Lourdes, Fatima – she talks the talk of the

natives; she trades in their signs and symbols

(in Mexico, for example, she wore the Aztec

maternity belt to show she was pregnant).

Over the centuries, Mary of Nazareth has

gone native in countless countries. She is Our

Lady of Carmel, Knock and Walsingham. In

one early twentieth-century painting she is

even the Madonna of the Prairie, driving a

covered wagon, the shape of the tarpaulin

creating a halo around her head. Wherever

she is, she is the fearless missionary entering

dangerous territory, donning the clothes of

the country until she can say: “Do you know

who I am?”

Psychologists have noted that when empathetic

people converse they adopt, very subtly,     

the accent of the person they are talking to.

It is Mary’s ability to be like us that is the most

extreme empathy we can know here on Earth:

Madonna of the Streets, Madonna of the

Refugees, Madonna of the Ghetto.

But do we risk making a Barbie doll of the

woman of Nazareth, with an outfit for any

occasion? In southern Italy, during religious

processions, more than once giant statues of

Our Lady have paused outside the home of

a Mafia boss, and the Mother of God is made

to bow. The Mafia’s perversion of religion is

well known; at times like that the Madonna

becomes a puppet in their hands. Indeed, her

undiluted humanity and femininity leave her

vulnerable to all of us. It has become almost

the norm to paint her like a doll. But we risk

ignoring the real message that she bears.

When I taught catechism, the eight-year olds

in my class loved talk of Mary – she was

the mother who did not deal in rules and fear;

she was nothing to do with confession and

commandments. She is La

Madonnina (“the little

Madonna”) to children here

in Italy. When May came

around, I told them the tale

of Fatima and they were

enthralled. Until I got to the

bit where Mary showed the

children a vision of hell. Hell.                               

You would think the word had           

never been spoken aloud. They                                                        

actually jumped in their seats.

My co-teacher gave me a dark look and steered

the discussion away.

BUT WARNING, reparation and penance are

the fundamental messages contained in credible

Marian apparitions. And, at Fatima in

particular, the existence of hell. For Mary is

no puppet and no doll.

It is almost 100 years since those strange

happenings at Cova da Iria that we are not

required to believe. But it is hard not to believe

Sr Lucia’s testimony. The vision of hell was

so terrifying that the 10-year-old Lucia yelled

aloud; people in neighbouring fields reported

hearing that cry.

What the children saw were flames, people

burning and black demons. But even if we

don’t believe in this depiction of the Inferno

as literal, we must remember that God always

brings us truths in images that we, or a child

of 10, can understand.

It may be that fewer people in the Western

world believe in God these days than at any

point in history, and even fewer believe in

hell. Which is ironic, as glimpses of hell are

everywhere – in war, pornography and self harm,

to name just a few. And children are

far more likely to encounter images of these

hells than ever before. For even if they are

not seeing horror and pornography on their

smartphones, their friends are and it is becoming

playground banter. This may sound bleak,

but it gives Mary her greatest opportunity.

IT HAS OFTEN struck me as I recite the Rosary

how those repetitive words must shape our

psyche. These days, when we have ever greater

access to appalling and potentially desensitising

images of cruelty, these kinds of prayers

are even more essential. They form the brain

with truth and beauty; we can make those

images outnumber and neutralise the ugly.

After all, what we put into ourselves on a

regular basis becomes what

we are. This is not to reduce

the power of the supernatural

in prayer – it is about enabling

our brains to receive it and let

it grow.

We are familiar with John

the Evangelist taking Mary

into his home after the

Crucifixion. But Benedict XVI

has illuminated this English

translation with a truer sense

of the original Greek: John is described as

taking Mary into his inner life, his inner being.

This is far from simply giving her a bed in the

spare room. This is yielding to her and becoming

like her; she understands us but in turn

we are asked to absorb her utterly.

Within ourselves she might tread through

selfishness, unbelief or hopelessness – all

cracks into which darkness can pour. That is

why we should pause often in this tinselly

season to recognise her almost incredible feminine

power and to say, as often as we possibly

can, “Hail Mary …” If we do so, we will be

better able to try and achieve the courage of

her fiat and her unsurpassable strength and

patience in prayer, as the life of her child

unfolded, ended and began again.

 “It is Mary’s ability

to be like us that

is the most

extreme empathy

we can know

here on Earth”

BUDDHISM DOES NOT CONTRADICT CHRISTIAN FAITH

 BUDDHISM DOES NOT CONTRADICT MY CHRISTIAN FAITH 

 Although Buddhism has been one of the greatest passions of my life, I almost never talk about it. Few of my colleagues are aware that my first research degree was in Buddhist philosophy. Few of my Christian friends are aware that my first religious practice was Zen. 

My reticence stems from the way contemporary Western culture constructs Buddhism. The reaction of one of my students to an undergraduate course I taught was typical. “But when are we going to study Buddhism?” “This is a course in Christian thought. We won’t be looking at Buddhism.” Her face fell. “But I’m only interested in Buddhism.”

Buddhism for most of us in the West has a glow of mystery and romance about it. It possesses an exotic, mystical appeal that we do not sense in our own religious heritage. This effect is multiplied by the perception that in Buddhism, “You don’t have to believe anything” – it is simply a practice, floating blissfully free of any binding claims to which we might have to subscribe. Popular Buddhist leaders contribute to this perception, as in the Dalai Lama’s comment: “My religion is simple. My religion is kindness.” For the dogma-phobic culture of the post-1960s generation and liberally educated youth, Buddhism spells liberation from the straitjacket of doctrine.

But it takes only a brief acquaintance with early Buddhism, and with Buddhist practice in countries to which it is indigenous, to grasp what a mirage this image is. Native Buddhist institutions in south Asia, for example, are authoritarian, dogmatic (I do not use the word as an insult) and extremely creedal. Sri Lanka’s Theravada tradition makes the Catholic Church look like a hotbed of feminism. The cult of the Dalai Lama was about as brutal as any medieval feudalism, with gangs of monastic thugs to enforce submission, refined methods of torture, and armed clashes with rival sects. Zen demands a degree of conformity and obedience that would raise the hackles of any self-respecting child of Western modernity.

I say all this not in the slightest to impugn Buddhism. It is the exceptionalism with which Westerners often view Buddhism that irks me, not Buddhism’s own complicity in the general sin and ambiguity of humanity, which is rather curiously reassuring.

But there is one sense in which I think Buddhism is exceptional: it seems to me the finest natural philosophy there is. Nowhere else have I found the human mind so exactingly dissected, its pathologies diagnosed with such electrifying insight. Its analysis of the world of experience, of the realities we make for ourselves, seems to me one of the pinnacles of human intellect.

My admiration for Buddhism’s acuity of observation and analysis does not contradict my Christian faith, which came to me, as it happens, in the very midst of studying and practising Buddhism. I see Buddhism as simply a spiritual expression of modern medicine: it describes and diagnoses the suffering human being.

The pressing contradiction is rather in the treatment that it offers, and I maintain, against the hopes of well-meaning syncretists and perennialists, that it is a real contradiction. The Buddha’s medicine is meant to give us a mind that will no longer suffer. Correct spiritual practice will make us suffer less, and eventually not at all, as we come to perceive that suffering is a mistaken reaction to this world, a misperception.

But the Gospel, in flagrant defiance of such a reasonable course of treatment, makes us more susceptible to suffering, not less. I do not mean simply that we are invited to put ourselves in the way of pain and death for the sake of Christ. I mean that, taking Christ as our example, the holy response to situations of loss and agony is quite simply to suffer: to fall upon the ground and weep, to beg for deliverance, to sweat drops of blood. Nowhere in the foundational Buddhist texts would the realised practitioner suffer in this way. There it would signify a poor level of spiritual attainment indeed.

In one classic Buddhist text, the world is a burning house, and the Buddha shows suffering humanity how to escape from it. In the burning house that is a world of sin, Christ offers no escape, but rather, a command to remain in the fire, until it be extinguished.

I know which of these two is the most tempting. But something in me knows that suffering is a truthful response to this world. So I am not a Buddhist.

Carmody Grey is a doctoral student in theology at the University of Bristol.